Limitations are crucial to achieving breakthrough innovation. Use them to your advantage. Obstacles boost brainpower. You actually need constraints to get good at creating something remarkable. You need the limitations to inspire better thinking — thinking that challenges the status quo.

Productivity is defined as “the quality, state, or fact of being able to generate, create, enhance, or bring forth goods and services." A simpler definition that we tend to use? Getting things done. But I think the more complicated definition is better, because it reveals important nuances...

It was the summer of 1860 and Eadweard Muybridge was running low on books. This was somewhat problematic, since he was a bookseller. He handed his San Francisco shop over to his brother and set off on a stagecoach to buy supplies. Little did he know, he was about to change...

When a new group of interns recently arrived at Barclays in New York, they discovered a memo in their inboxes. It was from their supervisor at the bank, and headed: “Welcome to the jungle.” The message continued: “I recommend bringing a pillow to the office.

“How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives,” wrote author Annie Dillard. “What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.” No matter what you think your priorities are, what you actually devote your time to is what you’re choosing to make a priority in your life.

Many know of the epic race in 1910 between Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott to be the first to reach the South Pole, and the tragic end met by the latter explorer. Most people have also heard of the heroic leadership of Ernest Shackleton, who managed to save the lives...

It’s 4:45 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, and you have one question on your mind: what should I be doing right now? You’re busy getting things done, but the notification count on your email inbox is climbing by the minute. You really should get back to Tom on…what was it again?

One of the most important aspects of innovation is creativity. But the trait has been elusive. How on earth do you generate it? Stories of artists regale us with bizarre methods. For instance, Salvador Dali would nap in a chair with his keys dangling over a metal plate.

You can train your brain to think like CEOs, professional poker players, investors, and others who make tricky decisions in an uncertain world by weighing probabilities. All decisions involve potential tradeoffs and opportunity costs. The question is, how can we make the best possible choices..

Following Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio may be the neuroscientist whose popular books have done the most to inform readers about the biological machinery in our heads, how it generates thoughts and emotions, creates a self to cling to, and a sense of transcendence to escape by.